Bloemsec, a security services provider based in Bloemfontein, Free State, recently partnered with Drive Control Corporation (DCC) and First Technology Central for the deployment of StorMagic's hyper-converged virtual SAN solution, SvSAN, to eliminate single points of failure and increase uptime.

The security service provider previously used standalone, non-shared storage in its data centre; the environment lacked redundancy, required manual failovers and would experience downtime during failover events.

Also, the network was complicated and couldn't reliably support Bloemsec's mission-critical systems. The company decided to invest in a solution that would offer high availability, high reliability and continuous access to video surveillance footage within a virtualised environment.

Following review and collaboration, First Technology Central and DCC, official StorMagic partner, recommended the SvSAN virtual SAN solution to boost availability.

The StorMagic SvSAN was implemented as a high availability, hyper-converged solution deployed on a Microsoft Hyper-V failover cluster, utilising two Dell EMC R540 servers. SvSAN provides redundant storage between the two compute nodes.

"SvSAN was very easy to set up and offered a competitive level of simplicity and affordability compared to other virtual SAN solutions. SvSAN was able to streamline Bloemsec's environment down to two nodes, which reduced the need for more hardware and controlled costs," explains Raul Del Fabbro, Enterprise Solutions Sales at DCC.

Adds Vernon van der Westhuizen, managing director of Bloemsec: "StorMagic SvSAN is extremely cost-effective and easy to use. The software's simplicity, the high availability and redundancy features we've added make SvSAN an ideal fit for our organisation."

Bloemsec has removed the single points of failure that were present in the previous environment and greatly increased uptime since installing SvSAN. Acronis Backup is used to protect virtual machines and all data is sent from the primary data centre for backup in the cloud.

Why Bloemsec chose StorMagic SvSAN:

* Ease of set-up: SvSAN can be deployed as a single server, simple two-node cluster, or multimode cluster, with the flexibility to meet changing capacity and performance needs. This is achieved by adding additional capacity to existing servers or by growing the SvSAN cluster, without impacting service availability;

* Added redundancy: StorMagic offers high availability and can be kept online during routine maintenance. In contrast, physical SANs must be taken offline to run maintenance operations and routine updates. With SvSAN, downtime has been virtually eliminated.